# The Best Golf Courses in Scottsbluff

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-scottsbluff-ne/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Nebraska


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Scotts Bluff is the landmark of the Nebraska panhandle, the big formation that told wagon trains on the Oregon Trail they were getting somewhere. It still stands over everything in this part of the state, including the golf. In Gering, Monument Shadows plays directly under Scotts Bluff National Monument, with the landmark in view across the round, and that single fact shapes this whole list. Two courses, one private club and one public course with scenery no architect could build.

Candour first: this is a thin bench, two courses deep, and the panhandle is a long way from the rest of Nebraska's golf. What Scottsbluff has instead of depth is a setting with a genuine American landmark in it. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here the day keeps arguing back against the golf, which makes the order more interesting than a two-course list has any right to be.

Panhandle golf has a character the eastern half of the state never sees. The country is high and open, the wind is a standing condition rather than an event, and a golfer learns to hit it low and let the ground finish the job. Distances between towns out here are measured in hours, which gives a local course a weight it would not carry elsewhere. It is not one option among twenty. It is the option, the place a whole county's worth of golfers drive to, and both courses on this list carry that responsibility for their respective publics, members on one side of the river valley, everybody else on the other.

## 1Scotts Bluff Country Club

The country club takes first on the golf itself: the established private course in Scottsbluff, the competitive centre of panhandle golf, kept and played as a members' course with the conditioning and continuity that status buys. In a region of working public golf, the club is the one place where the full traditional article exists, a course maintained for people who play it every week and judge it accordingly.

The concession is significant and we will state it plainly. If you are visiting the panhandle once, with one round to play, this is probably not the round you should choose, because you cannot necessarily get on it and because the public course down the road has the monument. Rankings, though, rank courses rather than itineraries. On the quality and seriousness of the golf, the club stands first in the twin cities of Scottsbluff and Gering, as it has stood for the area's serious players all along.

## 2Monument Shadows Golf Course (Gering)

Monument Shadows is the public course in Gering playing under the monument, and its case is the view, which undersells it. A landmark on every hole is not just scenery. It orients the round, gives every shot a backdrop with real historical weight, the bluff the emigrants steered by, and turns an ordinary municipal round into something a golfer remembers years later when a hundred parkland courses have blurred together.

As architecture, it does not outrank the country club, and we score the golf first. That is the whole of its loss, and it is a narrow one. On the day, on access, on the photograph you will actually keep, Monument Shadows wins going away, and any golfer passing through the panhandle should play it without a second thought. The bluff has been the best reason to stop in this valley for a hundred and eighty years. Now it is also the second-best golf course, and the gap between the two is smaller than the ranking makes it look.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.